a critical part of air combat in real life is knowing where the enemies are, currently, pilots rely exclusively on their eyes for this task.
since the addition of radios to planes, they have been used to provide targets for aircraft to intercept, and this being modeled in game would be of great use to air realistic and air sim players.
this could be a simple private radio call out, not played for allies: “request bogey dope”, which would then prompt an automated response from the game giving an approximate direction, range, and altitude to the nearest enemy aircraft.
a more complex implementation could be to integrate this with ground targets, placing early warning radars around the maps. then the automated response would only inform you of the nearest enemy who is spotted by a radar site. this has an added benefit that ground attack aircraft would have targets on the ground that will affect the actual air battle, thus making their job more rewarding and useful.
later versions of this could also become a full datalink system for supported aircraft, marking the tactical map with several spotted enemies and allies.
i disagree, knowing where enemies are doesnt mean you can effectively defend against all of them, and in the current air battles climate most players would be flying too low for detection anyway.
also datalink normally only updates every few seconds, so it would be like current scouting anyway
Useful yes, but that does not equate to good gameplay.
It is rather useful to have a 100% working RWR in the game, but as can be seen, the accuracy of top tier RWR’s leads to notching being the dominant tactic against SARH and ARH missiles, which is unrealistic as digitalized radars made notching maneuvers obsolete.
the aircraft in the game as of now are very much supposed to be susceptible to notching, not to this extent, but notching is valid, even into the f16. mostly aesa radars are better at dealing with notching, pulse doppler can only partially compensate. even if the planes radar was good enough, the missile also needs to be able to sort targets through notching
more importantly, notching is also the sole thing keeping air battles playable, can you imagine having to kinematically defeat launches from 4+ different planes in a 100km map?
that tangent aside, datalink isnt a perfect track of an enemy, it updates every 3-5 seconds, meaning that if you rely exclusively on datalink, or radio intercept calls, you are going to be looking for a target that is over a kilometer away from where the datalink tells you. also i do agree with having only partial map coverage for datalink, in fact i made another thread suggesting the placement of ground radar targets, that can be destroyed to knock out radar coverage.
I’d rather not go into the long discussion of how unrealistic current radar systems are lol, but datalink would create a big divide between planes that have it and planes that don’t. Entire teams worth of people fighting entire teams worth of planes that do.
is that not kind of the point of adding new features to vehicles? to have an advantage over people who dont have it? it would certainly make the older jets feel weaker, but that just pushes for either more decompression, or new tactics for the older aircraft. they would still have radio communication for their needs too.
every mid-late fourth gen has datalink, su27, f14, f16, gripen, and all their other variants. the only top tier jets that dont have them would be the mig 29, f15a, and all of the aircraft that are already behind in the br bracket. so i dont think this is as apocalyptic as you think.